Steps to mitigate misinformation campaigns. The Russians aren’t the only ones doing it.

the internet companies that sold ads to Russians over the past few years can voluntarily adopt the Honest Ads Act’s provisions. They’ve taken some steps in that direction, but there is certainly more they could do.

a recent BuzzFeed analysis of top political pages on Facebook showed that right-wing sites published false or misleading information 38 percent of the time, and lefty sites did so 20 percent of the time.

This gets to the deeper problem: We all tend to filter documentary evidence through our own biases. Researchers have shown that two people with differing points of view can look at the same picture, video or document and come away with strikingly different ideas about what it shows.

As readers know, the staff here at NobodyisFlyingthePlane are not big fans of the Facebook. It’s a soul suck…blah, blah, blah. But it’s also a political shit making machine.

If ever there was a perfect place for the polarized political bleating of sheep it is FB. That’s not the real problem though. The real problem is the volume of unsubstantiated garbage with suspect, if any, sources that flows over their users.

It comes from all sides, but readers mostly only here crap that further reinforces their already deeply held views. The flow of garbage just makes it worse with outrageous headlines, crap content and no actual reporting or investigation.

Say what you will about The Media, but this is effectively bathroom graffiti writ large and read by millions while they sit on the throne.

Ultimately it makes the already broken system worse.

Before Hannity signed off, he posed a question: “So, does that mean anything?” It’s a version of the question that everyone wants to answer about Facebook and politics, which is whether the site’s churning political warfare is actually changing minds — or, for that matter, beginning to change the political discourse as a whole. How much of what happens on the platform is a reflection of a political mood and widely held beliefs, simply captured in a new medium, and how much of it might be created, or intensified, by the environment it provides? What is Facebook doing to our politics?

Good politics requires fair and balanced coverage. Covering both political parties is fair, but balancing coverage by giving weight to bad politicians, bad ideas, and bad practices is bare and fallacious.

And Mr. Trump is far from being the only current political figure who benefits from the determination to find balance where none exists. Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House, has a reputation as a policy wonk, committed to fiscal responsibility, that is utterly incomprehensible if you look at the slapdash, fundamentally dishonest policy documents he actually puts out. But the cult of balance requires that someone on the Republican side be portrayed as a serious, honest fiscal expert, so Mr. Ryan gets slotted into that role no matter how much a con man he may be in reality.
bothsidesism isn’t new, and it has always been an evasion of responsibility.

A fascinating look at how @MakeDonaldDrumpfAgain broke the Media and side stepped it’s typical gatekeepers.

Time and time again the staff here at NobodyisFlyingthePlane sees hints of the good that can come from this election cycle madness we’re witnessing. Feel the Bern is shaking the left and Trumpapalooza is breaking the right. But its just as the writer says; a controlled burn intended to clear out dead wood can burn neighborhoods. Each bit of good news has a potential dark side.

The breakdown of the Media’s ability to control info comes with the loss of importance of fact checking and truth becomes a purchaseable commodity. The possible implosion of the two party system creates the potential for third party candidates to syphon votes from one side only. The ability to run without corporate funding means that the most likely candidates to do so are obscenely wealthy to begin with.

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It’s not worth reading the article. The title says it all. It is worth noting what real and overt censorship is, and that it still exists in the world. Whatever qualms we may have with media and government in our country seem small in comparison. NYTimes: China Blocks Web Access to Times After Article http://nyti.ms/RZFJVn